The Potter's Field
by Elaienar
Summary: Bittersweet: When he opens his eyes again, Monk Gyatso will put his hands on Aang's shoulders and say, "It's all right. I knew you'd come back." A collection of one-shots for The Last Airbender.
1. The Potter's Field

Disclaimer: I don't own _The Last Airbender_. Please don't sue me or say mean things to me. It would hurt my feelings and I might even cry.

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**The Potter's Field**

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He has counted the money in the small sack three times, round coins slipping through his gnarled fingers and clinking against each other as they fall, a cold, empty sound. Thirty coins. Thirty copper coins, for the last breath of hope in a dying world, for the Firelord's ease of mind and a smooth path to victory. He could stay two nights in a tavern for thirty copper coins, or feed himself for seven days. He could give thirty copper coins to a guide, a guide who could take him to Omashu, a guide who would probably creep away in the night and leave him alone and defenseless in a lawless country.

For all his life he has lived in poverty and hopelessness: he is hopeless still and in two days he will be as poor as he was the day before. He thinks of the boy's sad brown eyes, and wonders whether the world was ever really a better place. It's hard to imagine it, a world where the men don't leave home as soon as they're old enough to enlist, a world where neither Earth Kingdom nor Fire Nation soldiers raid the small villages for food and curse the starving villagers when they find none. It's hard to imagine a world where the women aren't bent and twisted with despair, and where the children laugh and play instead of scrabbling in dusty, fruitless fields or begging in narrow streets.

He had a child once, he thinks. A daughter. They called her Huian: that spring there was a lull in the fighting, and the Fire Nation Army had drawn back almost to the wide beaches where they had landed so long ago. But before the end of summer they flooded back into the valleys and scaled the mountains with their black machines, and the last time he saw Huian she was calling herself Peach Blossom and painting her face with garish whites and reds. He remembers wondering where her smile, her mother's smile, had gone, as she clung to the arm of a drunken soldier and laughed.

That was in the little town at the foot of the mountain, and it's there that he goes, counting the coins again as he replaces them in the little bag. Thirty – thirty copper coins. For thirty copper coins he can buy enough mijiu to hold the world away for a long time.

Nobody notices him when he shuffles into the lamp-lit tavern, except the golden-eyed barkeep and a girl with full lips and a hard look about her. In one corner a rat-faced local is cheating a young Fire Nation soldier at cards; in another a group of men are watching an arm-wrestling match, cursing and cheering and shouting. He squeezes between a sobbing middle-aged man and a younger one who stares blankly at the wall, clutching his drink in one hideously twisted hand, and puts the bag down on the bar.

The barkeep upends it and counts the dull coins that roll onto the counter, then looks up and raises an eyebrow.

"All of it," he says. Thirty copper coins – the barkeep sweeps them off the counter into one hand and turns away. He looks down, and wipes his sweaty hands on the red and yellow robes he's forgotten to shed; the red looks like dried blood.

The barkeep sets down a bowl of the local drink and turns away to murmur to the staring young man. He stares down at his reflection and thinks he can see past it, to a slim, painted face and a round, fearful one. Thirty copper coins. For thirty copper coins he could have bought a bracelet for a pretty girl, or a wooden toy for a child. But the world is no place for children, these days. The world is no place for anyone.

He picks up the bowl and drinks.

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_Finis_

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A/N: This is the first thing I've written since I relocated to Houston over a month ago to help my grandmother take care of my aunt. (She's in the hospital recovering from a stem cell transplant for leukemia. So far she's had mouth sores, pneumonia, liver disease, bad kidneys, and a hole in her heart. We look forward to more exciting illnesses in days to come.)

Featuring Old Man in Temple, played by Randall Duk Kim, from _The Last Airbender_. I gave his daughter a name in this story, but I didn't give him one. Why? Well, either I think Old Man in Temple is a really cool name, or I was just lazy, or I just felt like it. Take your pick. And thanks for reading.


	2. Avatar

Disclaimer: I still do not own _The Last Airbender_. This is of course a terrible thing.

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**Avatar**

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The boy is an Earthbender. He liked to roll pebbles across the floor, teasing the fox-cat, which was offended by the way the stones dodged him; his father called him a prodigy, before the Firebenders come to their isolated little farm. While his father walks away between two of the soldiers, his mother's arms hold him more firmly than any chain ever could. She would hold his father, too, and tell him not to try to escape, but she is not an Earthbender and so they are both left behind, and his father does not come home. When they visit the prison in the nearby village he is not there and no one remembers his name.

It has been three years since then, or maybe four. Sometimes the Fire Nation soldiers come back, gathering taxes in animals or produce. Sometimes a lone Earth Kingdom soldier ventures out of the forest to ask for food or clean bandages. His mother lets them sleep in the barn, and the lines in her face grow more pronounced, as if every war-weary deserter is another stroke of the knife that carved them there.

One of the soldiers – not a deserter, but a wounded corporal who was left behind after a battle and is trying to make his way back to his regiment – tells them that the Avatar has returned. A tattooed Airbender in yellow and red, moving from town to town and raising the countryside as he goes. A mere child, wielding a wooden staff, doing what their proudest generals could not: giving them hope.

"I've seen him," says the soldier, sitting in the barn with the boy, eating thin soup from a cracked bowl. "About your age, he'd be. Just a boy." There is something like wonder in his voice, and his eyes are not the dark sunken pits that were the eyes of the other men his mother sheltered.

In the dark of night, the boy shaves his head and dabs at his skull with fingers dipped in dye. He changes into a homespun suit, dons a red cloak he sewed himself, takes a simple staff from its hiding-place in the barn, and sets off westward.

o

The little town is free. With the boy at their head, the Earthbenders stormed the stone walls of their prison and drove their guards before them, out into the streets, and then out into the countryside.

It was not freed without loss of life. Two small children and their father died before his young wife reached her house and crushed the soldier between the hearthstone and the doorstep. The third child, if he lives, will bear the proof of his mother's courage burnt into the skin of his face and neck. There is no "if" or "maybe" about his eyes. He will never see again.

Of the Fire Nation soldiers who swaggered in the street, fully three-fourths have been driven out. Nine are dead. Two are dying. One may live, unless his wounds become infected. Two of the villagers tend to him with steady hands, but in a corner of the room the widowed Earthbender sits and stares at him with hungry eyes.

The boy watches as families reunite and children dance in the streets, but he cannot forget the scorched walls of the widow's house and the way she screamed before she killed the soldier.

o

The boy sits in the dark and waits to die. The cell he is in is wooden – walls, ceiling, and floor – and the cage around him is metal, like the shackles they put on his father before they led him away.

If he was the Avatar, they would let him live, but he has already told them that he is not the Avatar. They have scrubbed the dye from his forehead and hands and dressed him in the simple dirt-brown homespun all the other prisoners wear. His hair is growing back and he rubs his thin hands over the stubble, manacles clanking.

It is hard to remember how long since he was captured making his way to another of the captured towns – two weeks, perhaps. In the windowless cell it is impossible even to know whether it is night or day, but he thinks that it is probably time for another meal of watery rice and half-cooked vegetables. There is little for him to do but sleep and eat, and sleep again before eating again.

There is machinery in a room nearby, and the clanking and hissing and the roaring of flames muffles the guard's footsteps, but the sound of the key in the lock rouses him out of the half-stupor he has slipped into.

"Don't try anything," the guard warns him, still in the doorway. The boy almost laughs – what is he going to try, chained and caged in an Earthless cell? – but they do not like laughter, so he does not.

"Don't see why we even bother," says the guard, still not moving, "it's not as if—" And he breaks off with a little groan and drops bonelessly to the floor. The tray tilts and falls from his limp hands, and the meager meal spills all over the floor.

There is someone standing in the doorway where the guard stood. The light from the hallway blinds the boy, and he blinks; the dark silhouette shifts and speaks, but not to him. "Katara, we've got another one!"

Now there are two of them, and one – smaller, feminine – moves into the room, stepping over the unconscious guard and the spilled food. Something clinks in her hands – she is unlocking the cage.

"It's okay, we're getting you out," she says, as the door swings open. The boy hesitates, then holds out his hands, and while she unlocks the chains she makes the same pitying noises that his mother used to make over the younger deserters when she dressed their wounds. "You must have put up a fight," she says, more to herself than to him, and the shackles drop away.

She leads him out of the cell into the hallway, where the tall one who knocked out the guard is speaking quietly to a third person—

The boy stumbles, and they turn towards him. Carrying a staff in one hand, an intricate tattoo just visible beneath the hood of his red cloak, extending past the cuffs of his yellow shirt onto the backs of his hands, and – so young. Younger even than the boy, whose fourteenth birthday passed unnoticed sometime after he left home. But his eyes are shadowed and old.

"Are you all right?" asks the Avatar.

The sores on his wrists and ankles ache; the boy's legs are trembling and his mouth is dry. His side aches where he was kicked, once, weeks ago, and deep inside him he still feels the cold knot that has been with him since the Earthbenders' freedom cost the lives of three innocents, but the Avatar looks at him with kind brown eyes, and he swallows, feeling the knot loosen.

"I'm all right," he says.

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_Finis_

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**A/N: **I wrote the beginning of this story around two in the morning, as I was lying in bed trying to sleep and wondering why so many of the random people the Gaang run into in the cartoon seem to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Aang is the Avatar … even though there were quite a few cosplayers at Full Moon Bay. Therefore: in the movieverse, some random Earthbender kid pretends to be the Avatar to continue the rebellion in another of those itty bitty Earth Kingdom towns. I think I meant for him to die in the end, but somehow it turned out like this instead. Well, it was very late. If this story makes no sense at all, you know the reason.

Thanks for reading!


	3. Bent

Disclaimer: I have thirty whole dollars, but they laughed at me when I offered to buy _The Last Airbender_. I'm not really sure why.

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**Bent**

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He tells himself that he only closed his eyes for a moment. Not even a minute, just one second, because the sight of waves towering over him, reaching up like praying hands into the sky and curving down to snatch him out of the air, was too terrible and beautiful to bear. The Avatar shouldn't be afraid of the elements (what are they but a part of himself?) but the Avatar shouldn't run away, either. No – the Avatar shouldn't be someone who cannot face raging seas and the trusting faces of his people, shouldn't be a frightened twelve-year-old boy – shouldn't be Aang.

He only closed his eyes for a moment, but a moment is a hundred years and when he opens them everything has changed.

This world, his world, is all fire and ice, and the ground shifting under his feet, uneasy, _unbalanced_ his mind whispers. Water is divided, pared down to a tiny village in the south, and in the north a rigid, frozen culture, self-contained, and unchanged in a hundred years. Earth endures, but is weakening, falling back and losing form the way the most solid stone erodes after centuries of weathering. Fire is out of control, a flame licking hungrily at the edges of a parchment map. Air is no more.

There is no way back, no celestial scale to lean on, to stop the earth from spinning off its axis and into endless darkness. There is no way to close his eyes and forget what it has become. He cannot leave it behind and return to the kinder world of his childhood: when Aang sleeps, he wakes gasping for breath – there is no air – _there is no Air_.

He only closed his eyes for a moment, but the world has come crashing down around him, and now he lies awake, staring at the shifting stars, afraid; he cannot close his eyes.

Not even for a moment.

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_Finis

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**A/N:** This little thing was not written in the middle of the night, but you can't really tell. Thanks for reading!


	4. The Necklace

Disclaimer: I have not miraculously acquired the rights to _The Last Airbender_ in the day(s) since my last fanfiction. Oh well.

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**The Necklace**

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Zuko almost doesn't see the necklace. He's standing in the middle of the deserted prison-yard, and his focus is on the traces of the rebellion: lean-tos and tents knocked over, craggy, unnatural depressions in the ground, a Fire Nation soldier's helmet lying crushed near the gates, a spear broken in half and thrown down next to an upturned cooking pot. But the sun glints off the blue stone, drawing his eyes down to where it lies in the dust by his feet. It's half-covered in dirt, but he can make out the shape of it, and he stoops to pick it up, wondering how a girl's trinket came to be abandoned on a battlefield.

…And then wondering, suddenly, how a _Water Tribe_ girl's trinket came there, for no Earth Kingdom shop produced this. The strap has an unfamiliar feel to it, softer than the leather they buy in Earth Kingdom trading ports, and the clouded blue stone with its odd swirling pattern is unlike anything he's ever seen. A trader could have sold it, perhaps, to a soldier wanting to bring his girl some sign of his stay on foreign shores … but Zuko dismisses that idea quickly, thinking instead of the Southern Water Tribe – of a girl and a boy, brother and sister by the look of them, the girl's furious stare and clenched fists. And thinking, also, of the reports that the Avatar is traveling with two Water Tribe siblings, a boy and a girl.

"Uncle!" he says, and Iroh looks up from the overturned brazier. "Stop fooling around. We're leaving."

As he turns to go, he slips the necklace into his pocket.

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He keeps the necklace near him for reasons he cannot fully explain, even to himself. At first he has some idea of using it to find the Avatar – he's heard stories of the tracking abilities of the shirshu – but the _terrible accident_ (his uncle repeats the phrase to him, chuckling slightly) that destroys his ship leaves him somewhat short of funds.

After a while it is merely a fixture, a familiar object he keeps simply because he has no reason to get rid of it. He wears it on his right wrist; the strap that used to encircle the Water Tribe girl's slender neck is barely long enough to pass around his wrist twice, and the blue stone dangles against the palm of his hand. It is always cool against his warm skin, no matter how often he wraps his fingers around it.

He finds its coldness strangely comforting.

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Zuko lunges at the Avatar again, furious as the way he keeps slipping from his grasp, and the boy kicks out at him to deflect his outstretched arms. The blow glances off his right wrist, and he feels the strap suddenly loosen and fall away. The necklace flies out of his sleeve and clatters across the floor, coming to a stop between them.

The Avatar stops, too, eyes widening almost comically. "That's Katara's!" he exclaims. "Why do _you_ have it?"

Zuko is not inclined to explain that he has formed an irrational emotional attachment to a piece of jewelry, but the Avatar isn't waiting for an answer, anyway. He darts across the room and lifts the necklace off the floor with one foot, tossing it into the air and somehow managing to catch it with his tied hands. The gout of flame that Zuko bends toward him as he ducks and rolls through a nearby doorway barely touches him, and the sound of the door slamming shut is followed quickly by the sound of a latch falling.

By the time Zuko gets the door open, the room beyond is silent and still. The only sign that the Avatar was ever there is the rope that bound his hands, lying loose on the floor with a tongue of flame slowly devouring it.

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The ice melts and streams away from Zuko's head, leaving him gasping for breath and fighting against the chill that seems to have settled into his bones. Even the frigid water beneath the ice cannot compare to the cold he feels now.

The Avatar is regarding him with calm brown eyes. "If you stay hidden here, the Waterbenders won't kill you," he says.

Zuko does not reply, concentrating on breathing. The ice around his chest constricts him, but if he could just breathe a little deeper, get a little warmer….

But the Avatar is already leaving. He looks back briefly as he steps over the threshold to say, quickly, almost as if reciting a lesson learned by heart long before: "We could be friends, you know."

And then he is gone, only Zuko can still hear his voice as he calls after the girl. "Katara! Katara, wait, I have something for you!"

There is a note in the Avatar's boyish voice that makes him think, suddenly, of how young they both are – no, how young they should be. But they aren't, not really, and there are more important things to consider now than the foolish dreams of children.

Zuko closes his eyes and breathes.

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_Finis

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**A/N:** If you've seen the movie you may have noticed that Katara's necklace has vanished after the "Imprisoned"-inspired scene, and it doesn't show up again until sometime during the finale at the Northern Water Tribe. I've heard a rumor that a storyline featuring the recovery of said necklace was filmed and then ended up being cut after a last-minute decision to convert TLA into 3D. I'm hoping we'll see those scenes on the DVD, but for now, here's my version of what happened. Thanks for reading!


	5. Bittersweet

Disclaimer: Still no ownership of _The Last Airbender_. I don't know what's wrong with these people, why won't they let me have it?

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**Bittersweet**

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They have made camp for the night and eaten their separate evening meals, Sokka and Katara's a pair of fish caught in the nearby stream, Aang's the remainder of the food given to him in the last town they visited. The villagers held up the deep woven basket as if they were making an offering to a distant and omnipotent god, and Aang accepted as if the contents were gold and silver, and not a few wilted cabbages and some worm-eaten fruit, hiding nagging guilt behind a smile.

Now they sit around the dying campfire, evenly spaced. Sokka is drawing diagrams in the dirt with a stick, muttering to himself; Katara is mending Aang's cloak, tongue caught between her teeth, eyes narrowed. She has closed up half of the long, clean cut the soldier's sword made in the shoulder: the stitches made in the dim firelight are as tiny and neat as the ones she put into his shirt and undergarment during daylight. Yesterday she spent an hour scrubbing the blood out of all three garments. Watching her, Aang wonders why she bothered with the cloak. It's already the color of dried blood. It wouldn't have made any difference.

When he looks at them like this, with the shadows dancing over their faces and the darkness swallowing their blue clothing, he can almost imagine that he is among his people once more: the curve of Katara's jaw reminds him of Sister Iio, and Sokka is hunched over the same way that Rinzen always was when he was working on his inventions. But only almost – Katara looks up at him, briefly, and he is the last Airbender.

Aang closes his eyes.

When he opens them again, Katara and Sokka will be gone, and he won't have to face their eyes, eyes filled with wonder and uncertainty and expectation – Katara's eyes, wide and expressive and pitying. When he opens his eyes again, the raging sea will subside, and he and Appa will fly home; they'll land on the broad terrace, hoping it's empty, but the novices will look up from their games and grin at him, the way they always do when he's in trouble and they're not. When he opens his eyes again, Monk Gyatso will put his hands on Aang's shoulders and say, "It's all right. I knew you'd come back."

But when he opens his eyes again, it is because of Sokka's yelling. The campfire has flared up to the height of a man, twisting and leaping like an animal writhing in pain, and Sokka has leapt away from it to beat with his hands at the smoldering hem of his tunic.

And Katara is looking at him again. "Aang?" she says.

Aang closes his eyes to shut out the brightness of the fire and breathes in. _An Airbender must detach himself from the earth and the things that are of the earth._ He breathes out, slowly, and opens his eyes. The fire has died down until only few small tongues of flame are left, licking at the charred logs, and his friends are in shadow again.

"Are you all right?" asks Katara.

In the darkness, Aang can't see her face.

"Yes," he says, the lie slipping easily from his lips. "I'm fine."

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_Finis

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**A/N:** The Chinese element of fire is associated with the heart, the emotion of happiness, and bitter foods, which is a very intresting combination when you think about it. There's no air element, but metal seems pretty close to me – it's associated with the respiratory system, sadness, autumn (which was Air's season in ATLA) and the peach ("momo" is Japanese for "peach"). Thanks for reading!


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